Another or An Other?

Janine Antoni
Luhring Augustine
Up Against
September 12-October 24



In Up Against, Janine Antoni pulls at the frayed edges of the female identity string both figuratively and literally. It starts with a single squared 15 inch digital c-print of a dark-haired baby in pink clothes, sitting in her high-chair using her orange plastic spoon to feed the belly button in the middle of her mother’s protruding stomach. Next, a slightly larger c-print called Conduit offers a fantastical view of Antoni holding a phallic, copper gargoyle in two hands under her hiked-up dress to pee through onto the New York skyline from the top of a skyscraper. The facing wall is lined with a row of crotch-height white podiums that support an oxidized collection of these gargoyles leering off the right hand corners. Subsequently, a darkened tunnel leads to a spot-lit, lead wrecking ball, damaged from use and ruminating in the wake of a hazel-brown eye projected on the back wall, which blinks to the sound of each wrecking ball hit; a sound that reverberates through the entire exhibition. Finally, in a crucifixion and a pièta called Inhabit, Antoni dominates the last room in a life-size print, her body harnessed at the crux of splayed white ropes which suspend her figure over a child’s room. On her lower half she wears a doll house, her legs cutting through the delicate, modern rooms like fleshy tree trunks. On the adjacent walls, two blurred prints selectively focus on a spider web which decorates the doll house’s tiny kitchen, complete with a live, brown spider.
At first, this progression and ubiquitous symbolism can feel disparate, and leave a viewer disoriented and annoyed. The gratuitous sexual references? The soft focus on motherhood? More religious symbolism? Another woman blathering on abstractly about what it means to be a woman? But does reinterpreting ever really get old? From the line of the baby’s orange spoon to mother’s round stomach and the curving stream of piss, to the lines and circles of the wrecking ball and iris, and finally the webs, Antoni isn’t just trying to re-define the old universal symbols of divine femininity —she’s stringing it all together. This show is quiet, resonant, subversive, sweet, mystical, and nurturing. It embodies the need to hold it all together in the face of feeling torn apart by what defines us. Antoni refuses and accepts all that she is Up Against, and it is refreshing to not have to choose.